Infinality
Related articles
The infinality patchset aims to greatly improve freetype2 font rendering. It adds multiple new capabilities.
Features
Infinality's settings are all configurable at runtime via environment variables in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/xft-settings.sh
, and include the following:
- Emboldening Enhancement: Disables Y emboldening, producing a much nicer result on fonts without bold versions. Works on native TT hinter and autohinter.
- Auto-Autohint: Automatically forces autohint on fonts that contain no TT instructions.
- Autohint Enhancement: Makes autohint snap horizontal stems to pixels. Gives a result that appears like a well-hinted truetype font, but is 100% patent-free (as far as I know).
- Customized FIR Filter: Select your own filter values at run-time. Works on native TT hinter and autohinter.
- Stem Alignment: Aligns bitmap glyphs to optimized pixel boundaries. Works on native TT hinter and autohinter.
- Pseudo Gamma Correction: Lighten and darken glyphs at a given value, below a given size. Works on native TT hinter and autohinter.
- Embolden Thin Fonts: Embolden thin or light fonts so that they are more visible. Works on autohinter.
- Force Slight Hinting: Force slight hinting even when programs want full hinting. If you use the local.conf I provide (included in infinality-settings fedora package) you will notice nice improvements on @font-face fonts.
- ChromeOS Style Sharpening: ChromeOS uses a patch to sharpen the look of fonts. This is now included in the infinality patchset.
See the README for details.
A number of presets are included and can be used by setting the USE_STYLE variable in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/xft-settings.sh
.
Installation
Infinality-bundle
Infinality-bundle is a collection of software aiming to improve text rendering in Arch Linux.
Currently, the bundle comprises:
- freetype2-infinality-ultimate - freetype2 built with Infinality and additional patches.
- fontconfig-infinality-ultimate - fontconfig optimized for use with freetype2-infinality-ultimate, including separate configuration presets for free (default), MS and custom font collections.
- cairo-infinality-ultimate - cairo built with Ubuntu and additional patches.
All libraries are built in a clean chroot environment and are available for both i686 and x86_64 architectures, including multilib support.
For best results and users' convenience, a complementary repository infinality-bundle-fonts is available, offering a wide selection of all necessary typefaces needed to create and reproduce hypertext documents. All fonts were manually selected, ensuring high quality text rendering as well as compatibility with proprietary equivalents used for the Web and the office. All fonts are 100% freely available and are licensed under GPL, OFL, Apache or compatible, non-restrictive licenses.
By default, no post installation configuration is required. However, for maximum flexibility users can easily customize the bundle depending on their needs.
Installation
The installation consists of adding the selected repositories to pacman.conf
and installing the packages from the relevant groups or meta packages. Remember to restart the X server after the installation to see the changes.
- The infinality-bundle repository contains core packages gathered into the infinality-bundle group.
- The infinality-bundle-multilib repository contains optional multilib libraries for the x86_64 architecture gathered in the infinality-bundle-multilib group.
- The infinality-bundle-fonts repository contains a comprehensive collection of free fonts gathered in the ibfonts-meta-base, ibfonts-meta-extended and ibfonts-meta-extended-lt meta packages.
Recommended fonts with restricted licenses
Below you will find a list of fonts that cannot be freely redistributed and thus could not be included in the infinality-bundle-fonts collection as binary packages. However, they can still be installed and used free of charge under specified conditions. Source packages can be found in the AUR. Please, read the EULAs for details before you use the fonts!
- ttf-brillAUR
- otf-nerisAUR
- ttf-allerAUR
- ttf-envy-code-rAUR
Usage
Users of popular Desktop Environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce4, Cinnamon, LXDE) should adjust font settings via their DE's control panel. Basically, the settings should duplicate those found in the freetype2 configuration file (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/xft-settings.sh
):
Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintfull Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.rgba: rgb
If your DE's control panel does not let you set any of the above, adjust only those available. Aside these values you can customise all INFINALITY_FT
variables. Example:
# Makes fonts darker and thicker export INFINALITY_FT_BRIGHTNESS="-10" # Not too sharp, not too smooth export INFINALITY_FT_FILTER_PARAMS="16 20 28 20 16"
- It is possible to skip installation of infinality-bundle-fonts if you want to use Microsoft proprietary font collection instead. If this is the case, you have to activate fontconfig MS preset to ensure the correct set of fonts is selected. To do so, issue
# fc-presets set
1) combi 2) free 3) ms 4) reset 5) quit Enter your choice...
and select 3
.
Run fc-presets help
for more information.
- If you would rather use a custom font collection, there is a
combi
preset available that should let you adjust fontconfig parameters accordingly. When you activate thecombi
preset, the content of 'custom' configuration files (/etc/fonts/conf.avail.infinality/combi
) can be freely modified. When you are done, do not forget to create a backup copy of the 'combi' directory.
More fonts
If you want to install even more fonts, there is an additional infinality-bundle-fonts-extra collection. Run
$ pacman -Ss infinality-bundle-fonts-extra
to list available packages.
Font substitutions
If you want to override default font substitutions set in /etc/fonts/conf.d/37-repl-global-preset.conf
or add new ones, use /etc/fonts/conf.d/35-repl-custom.conf
to do so. You will need to duplicate the template (16 lines of code) for each font family to be replaced and provide appropriate font names.
Package signatures
One frequent issue users may face with this repositories is that the package database or signatures do not correspond. Often a simple force refresh of the package lists (pacman -Syy
) will fix the issue. If that fails, try removing the infinality-bundle files from /var/lib/pacman/sync
and then resyncing again.
Updating
fontconfig-infinality-ultimate is updated frequently, usually every 3-4 weeks, after a number of recently reported minor bugs has been fixed. As every fix is immediately committed to the GitHub repository, users who chose fontconfig-infinality-ultimate-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] from the AUR will get them sooner, i.e. when they rebuild the package.
Upstream infinality
freetype2-infinalityAUR can be installed from the AUR. If you are a multilib user, also install lib32-freetype2-infinalityAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] from the AUR. The AUR also contains the latest development snapshot of freetype2 with the Infinality patchset: freetype2-infinality-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] and lib32-freetype2-infinality-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror].
It is recommended to also install fontconfig-infinalityAUR to enable selection of predefined font substitution styles and antialiasing settings, apart from the rendering settings of the engine itself. After doing so, you can select the font style (win7, winxp, osx, linux, ...) with:
# fc-presets set
The corresponding fonts need to be installed.
For more information see this forum post: http://www.infinality.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=77#p794
Troubleshooting
See also Font configuration#Troubleshooting.
Spotify font issue
If you experience font rendering issues with Spotify [1], you might want to try the following font settings:
USE_STYLE="2" export INFINALITY_FT_FRINGE_FILTER_STRENGTH="50" export INFINALITY_FT_USE_VARIOUS_TWEAKS="true" export INFINALITY_FT_CHROMEOS_STYLE_SHARPENING_STRENGTH="20" export INFINALITY_FT_GAMMA_CORRECTION="30 80" export INFINALITY_FT_STEM_ALIGNMENT_STRENGTH="25" export INFINALITY_FT_STEM_FITTING_STRENGTH="25"
Google Chrome issues
To solve rendering issues in Google Chrome browser described in this post, edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
file and uncomment the following entry:
<!--match target="pattern"> <edit name="dpi" mode="assign"> <double>72</double> </edit> </match-->
Emacs issues
Emacs users have reported issues with Noto Sans as the default sans-serif font. This will affect any font face that specifies "Sans Serif" as the font family including the variable-pitch face that is used in Emacs Info mode.
Noto Sans is a collection of many individual language specific font files. Emacs does not find the correct version when it tries to render the font and displays glyphs instead.
To get around the issue you need to either specify a different default Sans Serif font for all applications or modify the font family for any faces that specify "Sans Serif" within Emacs.
To change the default font for all applications place the following:
<alias> <family>sans-serif</family> <prefer> <family>Liberation Sans</family> </prefer> </alias>
in either /etc/fonts/conf.avail.infinality/35-repl-custom.conf
for global effect or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf
or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/conf.d/60-latin.conf
for a single user. For `combi` users, 60-latin-combi.conf
should be modified accordingly.
The default font can be any but Noto Sans.
To change the font in Emacs only:
If you prefer Noto Sans for other applications and just want to fix Emacs specifically then you can specify a new Font Family for the variable pitch face. This could be done via customize (M-x customize-face RET variable-pitch RET) or by placing the following code in $HOME/.emacs
or $HOME/emacs.d/init.el
.
(custom-set-faces '(variable-pitch ((t (:family "Liberation Sans")))))
Note that there may be other faces either in default Emacs or specified by themes that also use the default Sans Serif font and would have to be modified in the same way. Changing the system wide default to something like Liberation Sans is therefore a more universal fix.
GIMP issues
GIMP users have reported issues with the subpixel rendering of text in images (see for example this topic). The best course of action is to disable subpixel rendering completely for GIMP. Add a file /etc/gimp/2.0/fonts.conf
(or ~/.gimp-2.8/fonts.conf
for a single user) with the following content:
/etc/gimp/2.0/fonts.conf
<fontconfig> <match target="font"> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign"> <const>none</const> </edit> </match> </fontconfig>
Language specifics diacritics / glyphs
Some language specifics diacritics / glyphs are displayed inconsistently using default font.
This is usually the case with websites (notably blogs) utilizing predefined CSS templates that make use of web fonts missing support for extended Latin scripts (most often A and B). Even though this is not a problem with any of the infinality-bundle components and thus should be fixed by the author / maintainer of the problematic site, it can still be got round by creating a relevant font replacement rule in fontconfig. If you want to use this option, activate 36-repl-missing-glyphs.conf
first:
$ cd /etc/fonts/conf.d $ ln -s ../conf.avail.infinality/36-repl-missing-glyphs.conf .
and then edit the file accordingly following the provided example.
Overriding default replacement rules and adding custom ones is possible with 35-repl-custom.conf
. The file is activated by default, so all you need to do is edit if you want to use it.
Firefox/Chrome browsers rendering monospaced with proportional font
You can check which font the browser is using with the fc-match
tool. If for "monospace"
you get a proportional font like Arial
# fc-match "monospace" monospace: arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
you probably should run
# fc-presets set
General problems with fonts
If you experience general problems with fonts (e.g. certain glyphs are not loaded in PDF documents, while a font family providing them has been correctly installed), start troubleshooting by issuing
# fc-cache -fr
This will remove the entire font cache and recreate it from scratch.
See also
- Short article about infinality (contains screenshots)
- Infinality bundle and fonts - Home page of the infinality bundle
- fontconfig-ultimate - git repository providing all patches, configuration files and build scripts for the entire infinality-bundle+fonts collection in separate branches
- infinality-bundle: good looking fonts made (even) easier - infinality-bundle support thread in the Arch Linux Forums
- infinality-bundle-fonts: a free multilingual font collection for Arch - infinality-bundle-fonts support thread in the Arch Linux Forums